via amgreatness:
Let’s acknowledge once again that, as the English Prime Minister Harold Wilson once observed, a week is a long time in politics. The world is in a yeasty state at the moment. Who knows what will happen with the millions of illegal, mostly hostile, migrants that Biden has let into the country? Who knows what will happen in the Middle East, in Ukraine/Russia, or in Taiwan? With Iran and the Houthis? Maybe Joe Biden will be forced to bow out. He is probably one public fall away from an encounter with the 25th Amendment. And Trump himself, though apparently robust, is hardly a spring chicken. Could he not also be incapacitated, if not by infirmity, then by the machinations of the battalions of prosecutors baying for his blood?
The answer is “of course” to any one of these contingencies. But if we are asking about probabilities, not mere possibilities, then I would say Trump is looking more potent now than any candidate since Ronald Reagan in 1980.
I am happy to note that Douglas Schoen, former adviser to Bill Clinton, is thinking along the same lines.
“In many ways,” Schoen noted, “the upcoming presidential election may mirror the 1980 election, when Jimmy Carter suffered a landslide defeat at the hands of Ronald Reagan.”
It’s hard to remember the texture of sentiment back in 1979 and 1980. Today, Ronald Reagan is nearly universally admired. He won the Cold War without firing a shot. He jump-started an economic miracle that led to the greatest accumulation of wealth in history. It was “morning in America.”
But during his campaign, he was roundly excoriated as a dunderhead, a mere actor who would involve the country in war, whose Neanderthal views would set back progressive causes by decades, and whose economic illiteracy would bankrupt the country. It’s hard to recapture the contempt with which Reagan was excoriated by the best and the brightest, but it was just as visceral and widespread as the animus against Trump in 2016 and today.
And it is just this, as Schoen points out, that should worry Democrats. “What should alarm Democrats is that Carter, like President Biden now, was extremely unpopular, while Reagan, like Donald Trump, was considered almost unelectable.” Indeed, remember what the issues were. Back then, “inflation was a thorn in Carter’s side, much as it has dogged Biden since the first year of his term. Not for nothing, 2022’s inflationary surge hit the highest levels since … Jimmy Carter was in office.”
Schoen ticks off other similarities: in foreign policy, with Iran and the hostage crisis, and America’s standing in the world. “[I]t is becoming nearly impossible,” Schoen observes, “to argue that the world has been safer, or less chaotic, under Biden than under Trump.” Will Trump manage to capture blue states like New York and Vermont? Will his appeal be as nearly universal as Reagan’s? It seems unlikely at this point, but who knows? I think Schoen is right that the bottom line is this: “The American image of weakness, along with the polarization and division at home and the persistence of inflation, even at a reduced level, makes the 2024 election look eerily similar to what we faced in 1980.”